I love this from a New York Times blog:

The “local” label also says little or nothing about a product’s actual environmental friendliness. A resident of Sacramento, for instance, can take comfort in buying “local” rice, but it’s still likely to be rice grown in a heavily irrigated desert, at huge environmental cost. In the overall carbon footprint of a product, the cost of transport often turns out to be relatively trivial. For instance, a New Zealand study recently made the case that better conditions make lamb grown there and shipped to Europe four times more energy-efficient than home-grown European lamb…. Beneath the surface, the urge to buy local is often just a disguised version of the urge to punish someone foreign. But as a way to fix global warming, fretting about where your salad was grown is like thinking you can win a war by calling your sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”

Me: Actually, I don’t think this goes nearly far enough. The comparison to liberty cabbage is even more apt because the Progressives were keen on using food as a tool for political allegiance and organization. Exacting “food discipline” under Woodrow Wilson was part of a larger effort of national mobilization, by politicizing family life down to the dinner table. Today’s environmentalists seek to politicize the nooks and crannies of daily life in the same way. And I’m not even going to insert a gratuitous Sheryl Crow one-square of toilet paper joke here.

Anyway, I got this from Hit and Run. Details, links and commentary from Katherine Mangu-Ward here .